Campaign Building Part 3, The Characters

I’ve mentioned before that my approach emphasizes storytelling. We’ve talked about one of the major components of the story: the villain. Now I’d like to dive into the next major element of our story, the player characters. Here we have a complication in terms of traditional storytelling. 

Usually the author of the story has complete control over all of the characters of the story, yet you as the DM need to build your narrative not knowing what your heroes will do. The actions of the heroes are entirely at the whim of your players, and direct coercion of those actions is off limits. Or at least it should be. Interfering with the will of the players over their own characters should be avoided at all costs. Especially during game play. It generally creates a negative experience for everyone when the DM starts dictating the actions of the players. Then, arguably, only one person is playing.

There are a few things I believe a DM should be involved in with respect to the characters of the game however. Particularly if the story is going to be a long one.
1. Get involved with your players creative process before character creation happens

Normal points to communicate to your players before anything gets rolling is the starting level, a bit about the world setting, the kind of campaign you intend to run, maybe some house rules, etc. All of these points should be standard information given to your players. A few things a DM should also do for some of the more developed rule sets is to define what materials are permitted at character creation. D&D 3.5 is a prime example of such a rule set needing this kind of guideline. It is a version that has a vast selection of character options and its published material is replete with builds that should never be anything other than an NPC. The necromancer jumps to mind here. 

This will help you avoid the awkwardness of a player showing up with the Barbarian Xill (MM1) built for bare knuckle beat downs and rapid fire thrown daggers. They proudly created it with the help of the Savage Species book and are pumped to get the critter into a brawl. If you define the boundaries beforehand, the situation becomes more manageable. More importantly, these boundaries protect the players from irrelevance. If one character far outshines all others in a set of scenarios, those scenarios will probably only be fun for that one player. Sometimes heavy imbalance works, but often not, so be careful.

2. Be a part of the back story creative process 

I normally encourage my players to write their backstory first before putting any stats on paper. By all means, they can have an idea of class and race. But I strongly encourage them to define who the character is before the what. Then have them make character build decisions based on the story. I have them do this for a few reasons.

First, it can curb the character min/maxing urge. A 100% optimal build will rarely match up with a character story. Unless it’s a really boring story of ultimate awesomeness with never a bad decision made. The reality of table top role playing is collaborative story telling and action. If they’re decked out and everything they try is only just short of a sure thing, you won’t have too many memorable moments; because oh, they succeeded again, big surprise. A min/maxed character is better suited for a strategy board game than something like D&D. 

Second, it can help guide build decisions that add flavor to the character and the process of building lends itself to fleshing out the character. Maybe you want to add a feat or skill that doesn’t match the back story. Now you’re asking the questions: does it make more sense that I not take the skill? Or, this feat makes sense but now I have a cool idea of how I learned the ability. You might choose to deliberately neglect a skill to introduce some weaknesses (hopefully nothing too egregious) that make for more interesting game play. Of you start with the story, choices can be made in context with the story; instead of making a story in context with the build.

Lastly, it gives you early story input and you can use this input to build individual story hooks into the campaign. Your campaign needs creative input from the heroes and this is a great time to get it. Incorporating their stories in the larger narrative can really enrich the experience for everyone. 

3. Encourage interesting back stories

One of the most uninspired cliché origin stories ever made has to be: You are an orphan, and for some reason, you woke up two minutes ago somewhere unremarkable with complete amnesia. You are now searching for your lost memories or something to remind you of your past…

Okay, so you’re only probably an orphan.

A good DM can work with some really blah story ideas and still produce something entertaining. But if I’m given something like the story above and that’s it, it just smacks of player laziness. By the time I get an origin story of any kind, the player would know that this is no generic dungeon crawl they were in for. That back story would prompt me to ask them if they just couldn’t get any ideas, or did they simply not want to play the kind of campaign that I had prepared? There’s no hard feelings if they aren’t interested in what I created, but let’s all be at the game table for the same reason. If however, I got that story as a front, and the player had an actual history in mind hidden behind the amnesia, then we’re actually going somewhere. 

If a player needs help with a story, that’s never an issue for me. I can enrich an underdeveloped story with worldly tie ins, and I can make suggestions to get the imagination rolling. I think a good DM helps players enhance what they already have and give them more stake in the universe as a result. But if I’m building the back story of a character from scratch, then I’m building an NPC.

Here are some items that should make the needle peak on your story snooze-o-meter. These aren’t problems per-se, but they tend to suffer from an overdose of ordinary and it begs the question as to why the effort was wasted thinking of the idea in the first place:

• Amnesia
  • I find it interesting that the would be hero could lose their entire memory but still remember their own name and the fact that they’re a badass, but nothing else. My recommendation would be to ask for the backstory the hero can’t remember. If they can’t produce one, then ask them to keep brainstorming. I know I’m going to sound like a bitter old DM with a need to sarcastically vent my frustrations so I’ll not bother to hide it if that’s what it ends up sounding like. In reality, these are points of frustration. But they’re well meant just the same. If I’m being totally fothcoming here: it’s my opinion that if I’m going to take on creating content for a campaign that could last anywhere from 8 sessions to multiple years (it happened), asking for an interesting back story is a small request in comparison. Amnesia is not the way to do it.
• No surviving family
  • Ahh, so you’re an orphan. Then join the club in which so many heroes are a member. I’m not too sure how many backstories I’ve read that contain tragic laments of how the hero lost their entire family in a variety of forgettable ways, but the number is substantial. I’ve had a couple characters that have seen their family members survive the onslaught of orphan bound backstories. Now I can’t say that I’ve bothered to leverage the players family in a role playing session yet. But in my defense, the opportunities have been few and it’s always nice when the players mix it up a bit and avoid this over traveled road. The real tragedy is that a family is one of the few connections to the player that needs little justification when they spontaneously help the hero.
• Raised by animals
  • As it turns out, the Jungle Book story has already been written. I’m not sure what a player might constructively do with an origin story like this without importing some kind of intelligent society. However if this simple premise is all that is offered for the backstory, then my impulse is to think: “so what”? This is just a dressed up way of saying you’re an orphan and have nothing interesting to say about your past. Though I would be open to hearing a good “raised by animals” story that might have some interesting inroads into a larger narrative, but not many.
• The character owns a pivotal item
  • This one is a little different. We could be talking about a sword, a shield, a magical item, whatever. If a player dumps all of their attributes and feats into maximizing their performance with that one particular item, or if they build a character that relies heavily on the item; it would be wise to ask: what happens if they lose access to the item? What options do they have? Will the player sit there disgruntled and exclaim “I can’t do anything now!”? Will they stop playing? If the removal of the item would ruin the player’s experience, then there’s something dysfunctional with the character build and you’ll have to determine if that’s something important enough to address. No one likes to see their hard earned (or engineered) items disappear, but these quests tend to be about bad things happening to good folk. Sometimes the good folk experiencing bad things are the heroes. Letting this one slide could limit your options unless you want your player to learn the hard way.

Here are some character traits that start to infringe into the social danger zone. If you see these show up, consider them red flags. These aren’t necessarily game breaking, but they might be fun breaking. If played right, some of these points can be done really well by a player with the right approach (you’ll have to decide what that is), but often they are mishandled to the detriment of the game. Of course, if you run a game where in-party antagonism is part of the story, you might take these as pointers:

• Antisocial loner
  • Nothing says “I don’t want to play” more than this character trait. D&D is an interactive, social, and (usually) cooperative game. This trait compels a kind of role playing that draws a character away from interaction and teamwork. It’s okay as a former behavior that the character has since turned around, but when it’s role played, I’ve  only seen this character trait cause frustration and dissatisfaction between players (Not characters, players). 
• Missing a primary communication/sensory tool
  • If a player is considering that their character cannot or will not see, speak, or hear; ask why. A major sensory impairment tends to be a burden on the entire group. At best, it eliminates the player’s ability to effectively interact with the team and NPCs. Without some other mitigating quality to offset the deficiency, this build choice won’t likely create a rich gaming experience. You know you’re off track when you build your character with an actual handicap rather than a weakness.
• An extreme functional flaw
  • By an extreme functional flaw, I mean having a major penalty in a social or combat stat. This might be accomplished by taking drawbacks in exchange for additional feats or skill bonuses. One example springs to mind where a player took a major penalty to the Sense Motive skill (D&D 3.5) making him extremely gullible with a total modifier of -8. The first failure or two was pretty funny, and since the character had the quality, the DM obliged in making the skill’s use more relevant. But the gullible quality served only to spawn an abnormal number of opportunities for the players to be swindled by the NPCs. And like a joke told too often, it stopped being amusing and turned out to be burdensome.
• Absolutism / Uncompromising behavior
  • This can easily be a quality of the player rather than the character. But watch for instances in a character story that indicate that they have a hard stop on what would normally be reasonable activities. If a character has a religious prohibition against walking through doorways, you’ve got a problem. Like extreme gullibility, it’ll be funny for the first five minutes as the player crawls through the tavern window in broad daylight, but it will quickly turn into a curse when they reach their first underground dungeon with a multitude of doors and no windows. Seriously though, let’s look at an easy example. I know dwarves and elves stereotypically dislike each other, but that’s a cliché for the NPCs to struggle vainly with. If your dwarf fighter has a seething hate for the Elf druid in the party and vice versa, you might end up having a social problem before long. That kind of role playing can drag a group down if they’re not braced for it. Besides, the heroes are supposed to be able to rise above and overcome the things that challenge them. Gimli and Legolas didn’t stay adversarial forever, and so too the heroes of your quest should be able to get past petty stubbornness.

It’s a touchy thing for the DM to interfere with character creation and development, with regards to the red flags and problem areas. Intervening can certainly rub the players the wrong way. But at the end of the day, as a DM, we want to promote fun and avoid unnecessary interpersonal conflict. So use your best judgement with these points and heed them as your personal situation warrants.

In the meantime, happy gaming.